Cultured Meat Safety
The food safety aspects of cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat and lab-grown meat
What do food safety experts think about the safety of cultured meat? Is it safe?
This post contains links to everything I’ve written about the food safety aspects of cultured meat in the last few years. I’ve also touched on the ethics, sustainability and authenticity aspects of cultured meat.
For example, how do you know a $50 plate of cultured meat was really grown in a lab and hasn’t been ‘faked’ by the restaurant, or its supplier? We don’t have simple tests for that yet.
Contents
A food safety expert asks ‘Would I eat cultured meat?’ (video transcript)
Cultured Chicken Meat is Safe, Says FDA (Sort Of)… But I have questions
More surprising (disturbing) facts about cultured chicken meat
Cultured meat woolly mammoth meatballs - would you eat them?
A food safety expert discusses cultured meat safety
Karen Constable of The Rotten Apple Newsletter responds to the 2022 FDA ‘approval’ of cultured meat (video transcript)
Cultured chicken has been declared “safe”, but… As a food safety expert, I have concerns about the risks posed by prions in cultured meat, especially meat made with non-poultry cells or mammalian inputs like bovine serum.
Separate to any safety concerns, the recent release of information about a cultured chicken manufacturing process shows that there are aspects of the cultured meat industry that many consumers would find distasteful or worrying. These include the use of hormones from other animals; the need for animal foetus products and the use of genetic engineering technologies.
Cultured meat production is powerful modern technology to be celebrated, but it may never become a large-scale contributor to our global human food supplies.
In November 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a memo saying that they “have no questions” about the safety of a process for making cultured chicken meat. The ‘no more questions’ memo is a safety approval (sort of)*.
Food safety considerations for cultivated meat: The company’s original premarket notification document, and their subsequent answers to the FDA’s questions, explain how Upside Food identified food safety hazards and how they control such hazards in their process.
Much of it is standard chicken safety stuff, addressing hazards like Salmonella, Campylobacter and avian-human viruses, just as in conventional chicken processes. Chemical hazards from growth media and cultivation vessels are also addressed, with (almost) no food safety surprises. Except for prions.
Prions are proteins that have ‘gone rogue’ and started behaving like viruses for reasons that science doesn’t fully understand. The most famous prion disease is ‘mad cow disease’, a disease linked to the human disease Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease which infected humans who ate prion-contaminated beef in the 1990s.
Prions’ rogue behaviour is contagious, which means that if a rogue protein — a prion — from an infected animal comes into contact with a normal protein from another animal, it can turn that protein rogue as well. The rogue behaviour spreads, and this results in illness and death for the infected animal.
Prions are very heat stable, unlike viruses, which means that even cooked animal products can be infective. Worse still, there are no analytical tests for prions. Prions could be in the growth media for cultured meat or in the animal cells themselves, and that poses risks to consumers.
Animal serum is used in cultured meat processes. Serum is animal blood that is absent of cells and clotting factors — the “acellular liquid fraction derived from whole blood”. Serum could be risky. In fact, a scientific paper on the safety of cultured meat (2021) says “The most apparent safety issues may arise from the use of animal serum in the culture medium” and “cultured meat grown in foetal bovine serum-based media can be exposed to viruses or infectious prion”.
In essence, the only way to be sure you don’t have prions in your food is to avoid sourcing from BSE-infected animals. Unfortunately, there is no test to detect BSE in live animals.
During cultured beef production, a single cow cell is multiplied millions of times to make human food. If such a cell carried hidden prions, the results could be catastrophic.
Would I eat cultured meat? Being able to make animal meat in a bioreactor is a phenomenal technological achievement, and any company that can do so should be congratulated. But that doesn’t mean I will be eating cultured meat any time soon.
Hazards From Cultured Meat - General
“Cultured meat is a meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells. It is a form of cellular agriculture, with such agricultural methods being explored in the context of increased consumer demand for protein.
Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicines…
The production process is constantly evolving, driven by multiple companies and research institutions… Currently cultured meat is served at special events and few high-end restaurants, mass production of cultured meat has not started yet.” Wikipedia
Cultured meat cells can be grown on “scaffolding” to provide structure to the finished product. These scaffolds can be made from synthetic materials which are removed after the growing process, or can be made from biological materials and remain in the finished meat.
Potential food safety hazards from cultured meats
Transmission of zoonotic diseases to humans. These could be present as viruses, bacteria, parasites and prions.
Chemical or microbiological hazards from novel inputs (components), such as scaffolds or growth mediums. Some growth mediums are animal products and these could pose microbiological risks.
Biological hazards from the unintended consequences of modifying the properties of the cells, or from genetic or epigenetic drift which could occur over many generations of culturing.
Antibiotic residues, if antibiotics are added during production.
Allergen hazards from scaffolds, which could, for example, be made from chitin or chitosan. These may cause an allergic reaction in people who are allergic to crustaceans.
Chemical contamination from cell storage media such as cryoprotectant liquids.
The usual physical, chemical and microbiological hazards from meat, which could arise from cross-contamination, unhygienic handling and temperature abuse.
Regulatory and compliance hazards in cultured meat
Because cultured meat is an animal food but also a novel food, the regulatory status is unclear in many countries. The USA regulatory landscape is particularly confusing because the USDA regulates meat while the FDA regulates manufactured food, and cultured meat is both of those things.
Global trade is likely to be complicated as regulations will vary from country to country.
Ethical hazards in cultured meat
Some cell-growth methods require the use of extracts from animals in the growing medium. This is different to the actual cell lines that form the meat. The animal extracts promote efficient cell proliferation because they contain growth factors, hormones and other components that mimic the environment in a developing animal foetus.
Animal extracts that are used in cell culturing processes include foetal bovine serum and chick embryo extracts, which are extracted from dead animal foetuses.
It’s hard to know how many cultured meat companies may ultimately end up using foetal extracts for commercial-scale production. Any that do are likely to face backlash from consumers. However, companies may not have to disclose their use to consumers under food labelling laws, due to their likely status as a “processing aid” rather than an “ingredient” of the meat.
Cells harvested from cows’ udders are used to produce cultured milk products. Again, this might raise ethical concerns among consumers who want to purchase cultured milk for its “cruelty-free”, “animal-free” status.
Takeaways
The cultured animal food sector has interesting times ahead, particularly with regard to food regulations. The manufacturers will also need to deal with potential new food safety hazards as well as possible ethical concerns about growth mediums and production processes.
Sources:
Food safety hazards: https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/cb8667en
Growth mediums: https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-cultivated-meat/deep-dive-cultivated-meat-cell-culture-media/
Udder cells for cultured meat: https://www.foodengineeringmag.com/articles/100288-milk-without-the-cow
🍏 Recommended Reading on The Science of Growing Cultured Meat 🍏
Cultured Chicken Meat is Safe, Says FDA (Sort Of)
But I have questions...
Last week the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a memo saying that they “have no questions” about the safety of a process for making cultured chicken meat. The ‘no more questions’ memo (sort of) means that the FDA agrees with the manufacturer’s assertion that their process results in material that is as safe as chicken meat from conventional sources*.
This isn’t the same as regulatory approval. The FDA safety memo is specific to a particular production process used by a single manufacturer, Upside Foods, which was identified in FDA documents as process CCC 000002. The manufacturer still needs to get regulatory approval from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on the actual chicken product(s) before they can sell them.
Juicy Details About the Manufacturing Process
The FDA published the company’s premarket notice to the FDA on their website. A premarket notice is intended to show that a novel food is safe. And that document, all 104 pages of it, explains in detail how Upside Food makes their cultured cell chicken.
The company explains that their process occurs in two main stages. In stage one they find and choose the chicken cells that will be used to make the food. Stage two is making the food by replicating those cells in big tanks or vessels.
Stage one is called cell banking by Upside Foods. In the cell banking stage, the company prepares ‘banks’ of animal cells. The cells are isolated from healthy chickens and chicken embryos, then screened, genetically engineered (optional), tested and ‘prepared’. Hold up a minute, genetically engineered?! Yup, more on that next week.
Stage two is meat production. The company starts by making ‘media’ which is the liquid in which they grow the cells. They cultivate the cells from the cell ‘bank’ by repeating multiple generations of cultivation in the liquid media until they have enough cell mass to start turning it into muscle tissue.
At that point, the cells are moved to a tissue cultivation vessel, where the cells transform from identical cells into actual tissue, in that they differentiate to form the different cells that make the structure of a piece of muscle. The document doesn’t really explain exactly how they encourage the cells to switch from replicating mode to tissue-making mode. One assumes it has something to do with the components of the media in the tissue cultivation vessel.
When enough muscle tissue has been grown it is filtered out of the liquid and washed off, ‘de-wetted’, tested and made into food.
Food safety considerations
The company’s original premarket notification document and their subsequent answers to the FDA’s questions, which are attached to the end of the premarket notification in the online version, explain how they identified food safety hazards and how they control such hazards.
It’s all very much as you would expect for obvious chicken hazards like Salmonella and Campylobacter and avian-human viruses. And, as you would expect, any chemical hazards from growth media and cultivation vessels are both obvious and (seemingly) easy to control. Except for prions.
Big Question: What about prions?!!!!!
Prions could be in the growth media or in the animal cells themselves.
Reminder: prions are proteins that have ‘gone rogue’ and start behaving like viruses for reasons that science doesn’t fully understand. The rogue behaviour is contagious, which means that if a rogue protein from an infected animal comes into contact with a normal protein from another animal, it can turn that protein rogue as well. The rogue behaviour spreads, and this results in illness and death for the infected animal. The ‘bad’ proteins are known as prions.
Prions are very heat stable, unlike viruses, which means that even cooked animal products can be infective. Worse still there are no analytical tests for prions.
Prions are believed to cause the human diseases Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) which cause fatal brain degradation. A small number of CJD cases have been caused by eating contaminated beef products from cattle that carry the disease Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) (‘mad cow’). It is thought that blood components, like animal serum, may act as vectors for transmitting prions.
Animal serum is used in cultured meat processes. Serum is animal blood that is absent of cells and clotting factors - the “acellular liquid fraction derived from whole blood”.
Serum could be risky. In fact, a scientific paper on the safety of cultured meat (2021) says “The most apparent safety issues may arise from the use of animal serum in the culture medium” and “cultured meat grown in fetal bovine serum-based media can be exposed to viruses or infectious prion”.
Upside Foods say they are trying to phase out the use of whole animal serum and serum constituents during the meat production stage of their process.
Potential hazards associated with the use of animal serum, according to Upside Foods, include possible contamination with mycoplasma, viruses, endotoxins, veterinary drugs, and prions (p98 of the premarket notification).
Controls for prions in serum used in cultured meat production
The company says they control hazards in serum by testing for microorganisms (but this does not include prions), filter-sterilizing the serum (which probably does not remove prions, being relatively small molecules) and that they only source bovine serum from countries that are a negligible risk for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).
According to the USDA, “the risk mitigation strategies [for prions in meat and meat products] rely mainly on the elimination of tissues and organs known to harbor BSE infectivity in infected animals”. Essentially, the only way to be sure you don’t have prions in your food is to avoid sourcing from BSE-infected animals.
Controls for prions in cell banking processes in cultured meat production
The company does not include tests for prions in their cell line bank testing, even though they test for pathogens and zoonotic viruses. As a reminder, prions can’t be tested for. The good news is – and weirdly Upside Foods doesn’t mention this in their document - is that chickens seem to be resistant to forming prions, and spontaneous prion diseases don’t occur – to our knowledge - in chickens. This is good. Perhaps it is the reason why they have focussed on chicken rather than beef?
Beyond cultured chicken, what about beef?
If chicken proteins appear to be resistant to prion formation, beef products are not resistant, they are susceptible.
During cultured meat production, a single cow cell is multiplied millions of times to make human food. What if such a cell carried hidden prions? The results could be catastrophic…. unlikely to happen, but catastrophic.
Before we all freak out about prions in cultured beef, it’s worth remembering that in the past, prion diseases seem to have only been passed through food when people have eaten nerve tissue such as brain and spinal cord, or beef products contaminated with such tissue.
As far as we know, ‘pure’, uncontaminated muscle meat is much lower risk for prions than nerve tissue. But that’s not to say the risk is non-existent. This scientific paper says that the proteins that turn rogue to become prions are mostly present in nerve tissue in adult animals, but they can also be found in the intestines, heart, pancreas and liver of adult animals, and that cow embryos also contain those proteins.
With prions being impossible to test for, and resistant to, ‘normal’ controls like cooking, the fact that prions could perhaps end up in cultured beef is definitely food for thought!
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*the fine print: Here is the exact statement from the FDA’s Scientific Memo “Based on the data and information presented in CCC 000002, we have no questions at this time about UPSIDE’s conclusion that foods comprised of or containing cultured chicken cell material resulting from the production process defined in CCC 000002 are as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods. Furthermore, at this time we have not identified any information indicating that the production process as described in CCC 000002 would be expected to result in food that bears or contains any substance or microorganism that would adulterate the food.”
Sources
Main sources: https://www.fda.gov/media/163261/download and https://www.fda.gov/media/163262/download
Academic references (also linked above in the body of the text):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8230205/
🍏 Is Cultured Meat Actually Sustainable? This CNBC article from 2019 discusses 🍏
What’s in a name: ‘cultured’ meat or ‘cultivated’ meat?
The Upside Foods FDA submission uses the term ‘cultured meat’. But in Asia-Pacific, a group of stakeholders recently agreed to use the term ‘cultivated’ meat, rather than cultured meat when using the English language. That decision also needs to be translated into Asian languages. The group comprised cellular agriculture companies from China, Korea, Japan and Australia. The agreement was reached in Singapore which is the world’s first market for cultured meat, with approved cultivated chicken and a microbial-sourced protein ingredient.
Four Surprising Facts About Cultured Chicken
Two weeks ago, I shared the news that the US FDA had declared cultured chicken meat ‘safe’*, and – exciting! – had published a paper by the manufacturer Upside Food with lots of juicy details about their intended process.
While there were plenty of assurances in the Upside Food document about the safety of the food, I had a few questions after reading it. One question was about risks posed by prions in cultured meat (prion diseases include ‘mad cow disease’). I tried to answer that question in Issue #65.
Here are four more surprises I found buried in the Upside Food document:
1. Chicken cells that make the meat are genetically engineered to make them ‘immortal’
Normal animal cells can only replicate and divide a certain number of times before they start being affected by age-related deterioration (‘senescence’) and finally submit to biologically ‘programmed’ cell death. This limits how much tissue can be made from a group of cells.
Upside Foods says they overcome this limitation by inducing "functional immortality” using either “spontaneous immortalization” or by bioengineering the cells. The spontaneously immortal cells are naturally occurring. However, some types of cells that are needed to make chicken meat do not exhibit spontaneous immortalisation, so genetic amendments are required. The process involves introducing genes that are already part of the chicken genome to the cells to induce functional immortality.
The cells are made ‘immortal’ by adding/activating genes that repair telomeres in the cells and stop them from degrading. Telomere degradation is a key feature of cell senescence.
The immortal cells do not actually get used forever, they have a working lifespan limited by their “observed proliferative capacity”.
2. Residues of culture media in the meat are controlled by “it’s diluted”
Culture media is the nutrient-rich liquid in which the cells are first grown. Some of this carries over into the actual meat. While Upside Food says that “the majority of the ingredients are naturally occurring nutritive substances that are metabolized and biosynthesized naturally by poultry”, it’s not the majority of natural, safe, food-grade ingredients that interest me, but the minority of ingredients that might not be natural or food-grade.
We don’t know what these other minor ingredients are, exactly. But we do know that the manufacturer might use ingredients that aren’t actually food-grade.
Upside Foods says “Culture media aids that are not yet available commercially as food grade will be subject to Upside Foods’ internal quality assurance and food safety systems.” Righto then.
What process is used to prevent these mystery culture ingredients from ending up in the meat? Plain old dilution. The early stages of culturing have fewer cells, the meat-making process has more cells, and the early-stage culture medium is therefore diluted during the proliferation process.
Here’s what the manufacturer has to say about it:
“Through calculation, UPSIDE Foods demonstrates that media components used in the pre-banking stage dilute out to below the threshold of toxicological concern.”
That’s comforting. Maybe. (Find these discussions on page 25 and 26 of the document)
3. Cultured meat production can require a not-insignificant, on-going supply of fresh cow foetuses
and
4. Cultured chicken meat is likely to contain bovine (cow) ‘growth factors’ (hormones)
I'll unpack these two facts next week.
Sources
🍏 Academic sources are linked in the body of the text. The document by Upside Foods is their pre-market notification to the FDA. Find that here: https://www.fda.gov/media/163262/download 🍏
*What I mean when I say it was declared ‘safe’: The FDA says they “have no questions” about the manufacturer’s conclusion that their food is as safe as conventionally produced chicken flesh. Read the full statement in the FDA’s Scientific Memo.
More surprising (disturbing) facts about cultured chicken meat
Okay okay, I promise this is the last post about cultured meat for a while….
If you missed the previous few issues, here’s a quick recap. Last month the US FDA declared cultured chicken meat ‘safe’, and shared details of the specific manufacturing process that was the subject of the ‘safe’ ruling, including plenty of technical insights.
The technical document contained some facts that were surprising (to me). I’ve been learning more and writing about them in this newsletter ever since.
Last week I wrote about how this particular cultured meat process makes use of genetically engineered ‘immortal’ chicken cells. This week, I address the slightly icky facts around foetal bovine serum and growth hormones in cultured meat production.
Cultured meat production can require a not-insignificant, ongoing supply of fresh cow foetuses
Getting animal cells to grow outside the body is a tricky business. Without blood vessels and other structures that usually deliver nutrients and remove waste, free-floating animal cells need to be bathed in a rich liquid that promotes their growth and helps them flourish.
The liquid used in cultured cell production processes contains a mix of rich proteins and growth promoters, usually derived from the non-haemoglobin parts of animal blood: serum. The best animal serum contains the most efficient growth-promoting elements and is derived from the blood of foetuses, usually bovine (cow) foetuses.
Yup, baby cows ‘excised’ from their pregnant mothers at slaughter are drained of their blood to produce the cultured meat industry’s miracle grow juice, foetal bovine serum (FBS).
Foetal bovine serum supplies are dependent on the slaughtering of cows, which goes against the cultured meat industry’s stated goal of improving animal welfare and reducing our reliance on farmed animals. It is also outrageously expensive. One cultured meat expert estimated (in 2018) that it takes 50 litres of serum to make a single cultured beef burger. At a cost of hundreds of dollars per litre of FBS, the cost is so prohibitive that the authors of this paper state that “a serum requirement for [the cultured meat manufacturing] process would render it completely infeasible at scale”.
The cultured meat industry is working hard to find alternatives to FBS for its culture media, and at least one company has declared success in removing the need for FBS in its process. As for the company that achieved safety approval from the FDA last month, Upside Foods, it is “currently optimizing its process to phase out the use of whole animal serum, as well as animal serum constituents, during the meat production phase.”
But they are clearly not able to phase out FBS yet, which means that their cultured meat still relies on the slaughtering of animals.
Cultured chicken meat is likely to contain bovine (cow) ‘growth factors’ (hormones) – but (good news!), no human protein
Getting chicken cells to grow outside a chicken body is difficult, but growth-promoting chemicals help. In fact, such chemicals are a necessary ‘ingredient’ in the production of cultured meat. There are many different compounds that can promote growth, including hormones, small biological molecules that can interact with receptors inside cells.
You might imagine that chicken cells would grow best with chicken-specific growth promoters, but the Upside Foods process makes use of bovine (cow) ‘growth factors’, not chicken growth factors, at least for now. For as long as their culture media contains foetal bovine serum, it also contains bovine growth factors.
It isn’t clear how much of these cow-derived hormones will end up in the final chicken meat – perhaps not much – but this mixed-species growing system makes the meat seem perhaps a little more ‘Frankenstein’ and a little less ‘clean and green’ than their marketing department might like.
The good news? No human proteins. Well, that’s comforting! Upside Foods explains, in its response to the FDA’s requests for clarification (p 12), that the company does not use “human cell culture systems” and that “human recombinant growth factors are avoided.” Glad we got that cleared up! (But can’t believe they had to spell it out in their submission)….
Growth factors are not explicitly approved as novel food ingredients but they are naturally present in conventionally raised meat. The company assured the FDA that it “only uses growth factors with protein sequences that are 100% homologous to those from agriculturally important animals with a history of safe consumption (e.g., bovine, porcine, chicken)”. Porcine?! I wonder what the Kosher authorities would say about that…
Sources:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/scaling-clean-meat-serum-just-finless-foods-mosa-meat
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369703X1830024X
Further reading: Scaling up cultured meat production
This fascinating scientific paper describes how cultured meat bioreactors might work at scale and discusses the cost of setting up and running a full-sized production facility for cultured meat. The writers estimate that (optimistically), American-grown cultured meat could be produced for $63 per kg, if technology improves and if the cost of growth media can be reduced.
🍏 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154322000916?via%3Dihub 🍏
Old (Extinct!) Meat — Would you eat woolly mammoth meatballs?
A cultured meat company has used cutting-edge technology to create woolly mammoth meatballs.
[The meatball] looked oddly furry, like it had been coughed up by a cat or rolled around by a dung beetle - The Atlantic, 31st March 2023
Reminder: cultured meat is made by growing animal muscle cells in vats of liquid nutrients, then filtering out the cells for further processing. The cells can be genetically modified to make them more suited to the process.
How did they do it?
A team of scientists at Vow cultured meat company, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Queensland (Australia), started by inserting the woolly mammoth myoglobin gene into sheep myoblasts using CRISPR technology.
CRISPER is a type of gene editing tech (learn more about gene editing versus genetic engineering in Issue 4).
Myoglobin is an oxygen-transporting protein, similar to haemoglobin in blood. Like haemoglobin, it has a reddish colour. Myoglobin transports and stores oxygen in muscles and is the protein that gives meat its red colour. Myoglobin is one of the most abundant proteins in meat and contributes to the flavour and moisture content as well as its colour. It has also been found to promote cell growth in cultured meat production.
Myoblasts are a type of stem cell that can differentiate into muscle cells.
The modified sheep cells containing mammoth myoglobin were then grown, removed from their growth vessel and cooked into a large meatball (source).
Why did they do it?
Because they can. This project is a marketing showcase for cultured meat - it fires up the imagination in a way that Singaporean chicken nuggets (the only legally available cultured meat) just can’t.
The project not only raises awareness of, and excitement about, cultured meat among consumers, it also demonstrates the seemingly limitless opportunities presented by cultured meat when it comes to custom-designed foods. If you can put mammoth myoglobin into sheep, you could, perhaps, boost vitamin B12 levels in chicken - less sexy, but more helpful to micro-nutrient deficient populations.
Of course, it’s also a bit about the company, Vow, showing off its abilities - that giant meatball shows that they can produce red meat at scale. Vow is soon to launch cultured quail meat in Singapore.
Would you eat mammoth meatballs?
I wouldn’t eat mammoth meatballs, and no one was planning to eat this one either. A key scientist for the project said that there is no way of knowing how the human immune system might react to a protein that “hasn’t been seen for thousands of years.” (source).
In terms of food safety, immune responses are a valid concern, but I am more worried about prions. Because of prions, I’m a lot less comfortable with cultured mammal meat (beef, sheep, mammoth), compared to cultured poultry meat (chicken, quail, dodo*).
Cultured meat processes could magnify the risks posed by prions - tiny molecules that cause catastrophic illnesses and that cannot be detected in food - and these risks haven’t been explored enough yet, at least not in public. Prion diseases have been linked to mammal-meat foods, whereas chickens, and presumably other birds, seem to be resistant to forming prions, and spontaneous prion diseases don’t occur – to our knowledge - in chickens.
*Dodo bird 🐦was the first animal the team considered for this project, but the DNA sequences they needed were not available (source).
Fraud in Cultured Meat (Research Paper)
“The cultured meat industry is not exempt from the threats of food fraud.” Say the authors of a new paper titled Checkmeat: A review on the applicability of conventional meat authentication techniques to cultured meat which discusses how current authentication tests could be used to assist with the traceability of cultured meat.
It calls for the identification of both physical and biochemical markers which could be used to differentiate cultured meat from conventional meat.
https://www.kosfaj.org/archive/view_article?pid=kosfa-2023-e48
Cultured quail foie gras ready for diners
April 2024
The Australian cultured food maker, Vow (see mammoth meat balls, above), has launched a quail foie gras, or “parfait” for sale in Singapore, where it received regulatory approval last month. The product is expected to be served in luxury restaurants. The product is said to have a flavour that is rich, sweet and delicate.
Australian lab-grown meat cultured from quail cells hits the market in Singapore - ABC News
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